AFTER MAKING A NAME for themselves with a series of
finely wrought melodramas and unconventional comedies in their first
several seasons, Third Rail Repertory have increasingly tried their
hand at slapstick—last season’s Dead Funny was a
pie-in-the-face homage to Benny Hill-style comedians, while this
season’s opener The Lying Kind is a morbid twist on a British
farce.
It’s a farce that quickly distinguishes itself with
higher-than-normal stakes: It’s Christmas Eve, and two bumbling young
police officers have been dispatched to inform an elderly couple that
their daughter has been killed in a car accident. It’s a great setup,
and the show’s opening scene will be familiar to anyone who’s ever
hovered nervously on a doorstep, afraid to ring the bell. The two
police officers stand on the stoop, torn between a desire to get on
with their work so they can go enjoy a Christmas dinner, and a
mortified awareness of just how grim their errand really is.
And once the door finally opens, it’s as bad as they feared: An
adorable little old man stands before them, the perfectly cast Richard
Mathews, who cheerfully plays into the protective impulses any humane
person will have toward such a sweet, frail old gentleman. Throw in a
crazy wife who doesn’t know what year it is, and a crusading member of
a local anti-pedophile organization who suspects the police might
actually be involved in some sort of child molestation coverup, and the
hapless coppers quickly find themselves involved in a tragedy of errors
of their own making, as they prove completely unable to fulfill the
mission they’ve set out on.
This is “gotcha” comedy, and it wouldn’t do to ruin too many of the
punchlines. Misunderstandings pile up right and left, and the elderly
couple at the center of it all remains blissfully ignorant of their
daughter’s death. And so the play’s best jokes come with a built-in
wince, a twinge of guilt at laughing in the face of someone else’s
misfortune—a marriage of the comic and tragic that grounds even
the script’s sillier convolutions.
But while playwright Anthony Neilson’s script deliberately toys with
the line between the comic and the tragic, on opening night, laugh
lines were still sorting themselves out. Madcap pacing is required to
get through some of the show’s more arduous jokes—in particular a
storyline about how the elderly wife, played by Jacklyn Maddux, is
prone to act out inappropriate flashback sequences—and as the
characters navigate increasingly outrageous situations, the humor can
feel strained. In particular, Isaac Lamb as the (female) anti-pedophile
campaigner has a bullish, over-earnest bluster that effectively dampens
the laughs in every scene he’s in.
But for all that some scenes drag, and some jokes splat limply
against the fourth wall, The Lying Kind‘s got a comedic saving
grace in the form of ensemble member Michael O’Connell, who once again
assumes the role of a bumbling police officer (see: last season’s A
Skull in Connemara). O’Connell proves an incredibly deft comic
actor, embodying a buffoonish character with surprising subtlety. It’s
worth sitting through two hours of hit-and-miss slapstick just to see
O’Connell’s awkward striptease—with one hesitant thigh slap, he
wrings more laughs from the audience than some of the script’s more
ostentatious plot twists combined. It’s truly an impressive
performance, one that does full justice to Neilson’s gleefully morbid
script.